History

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: By appointment
Phone: (212) 854-4096
Email: gwt2102@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Princeton University (’91)
MA: Harvard University (’96)
PhD: Harvard University (’02)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1365 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet
EARL GU4310 Life Writing in Tibetan Buddhism
HSEA GU4720 20th Century Tibetan History

Research Interests

Tibetan History & Religion

Gray Tuttle studies modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examined the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory). His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods (16th – 19th centuries) when the intellectual and economic centers of Tibet shifted to the east, to Amdo — a Tibetan cultural region the size of France in northwestern China. Deploying Richard White’s concept of the “Middle Ground” in the context of two mature civilizations — Tibetan and Chinese — encountering one another, this book will examine how this contact led to three dramatic areas of growth that defined early modern Tibet: 1) the advent of mass monastic education, 2) the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined. Recently he has turned to increasingly large data sets in an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history. In an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history, Gray has turned to increasingly large data sets over the course of his career. Starting with a database of over 1000 Amdo monasteries with dozens of fields of data (GIS location, foundation data, number of monks, rooms, livestock, etc), led to building datasets on 100s of incarnation series and monastic colleges as well, which have shaped the direction of the Amdo history book project in significant ways. Lately, with a research assistant, Gray has worked with larger datasets and the statistical computing and graphing programming language called “R” to examine existing data on Tibetan (mostly monk’s) longevity in comparison with Chinese monks, Chinese literati, and Europeans in history. Future plans include working with even larger datasets by examining the hydrology of the Tibetan plateau with climate scientists, to see if new perspectives of the large arcs of Tibetan history might be reframed by a deeper understanding of climate data.

Selected Publications

With Geoff Childs (Washington University in St. Louis), Rebecca Kippen (Monash University), “Longevity and Life Expectancy Fluctuations among Tibetan Lamas from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century,” Forthcoming in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines.

“A Qing Court Lama Dreaming His Place in the World,” A Living Endeavor: Individuals and their Inner Worlds in Chinese Religious Life. Edited by James Benn and Ben Brose. Brill, 2025, pp. 98-118.

With Lan Wu. “Tibetan Buddhist Vanguards among the Mongols and Manchus, 1576-1638.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, (October 2021).

“Pattern Recognition: Tracking the Spread of the Incarnation Institution through Time and across Tibetan Territory.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines. 38 (February 2017)

Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West. Co-edited with Ben Hillman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Sources of Tibetan Tradition (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

The Tibetan History Reader (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

Morris Rossabi

Morris Rossabi

Adjunct Professor

Office Hours: T 9-10 AM
Email: mr63@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (’70)

Classes Taught

HSEA UN3898 The Mongols in History
HIST GR6999 Graduate Seminar – History of the Mongols

Research Interests

Asian History

Morris Rossabi is a historian of China and Central and Inner Asia. He teaches courses on Inner Asian, East Asian, and Chinese history at Columbia. During the 2008–2009 academic year, he received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Mongolia. He and Mary Rossabi are involved in an oral history of 20th- and 21st-century Mongolia, which has led to the publication of Socialist Devotees and Dissenters; A Herder, a Trader, and a Lawyer; and The Practice of Buddhism in Kharkhorin and Its Revival (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 2010, 2012, and 2013). 

In 2006, he was named chair of the Arts and Culture Board of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). He is the author of Herder to Statesman (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); The Mongols and Global History (W. W. Norton, 2011); The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); A History of China (Blackwell, 2013); Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (University of California Press, 2005); Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (University of California Press, 1988), chosen as a main selection by the History Book Club; and China and Inner Asia (Universe Books, 1975). He is the editor of China Among Equals (University of California Press, 1983), Governing China’s Multi-Ethnic Frontiers (University of Washington Press, 2005) and Eurasian Influences on the Yuan (NIAS Press, 2013), and a contributor to several volumes of the Cambridge History of China. A collection of his articles has been published as From Yuan to Modern China and Mongolia (Brill, 2014). 

He has helped organize exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He was on the advisory board of the Project on Central Eurasia of the Soros Foundation. The author of numerous articles and speeches, he travels repeatedly to Central Asia and Mongolia, where he teaches courses on Mongolian and East Asian history.

Selected Publications

The Mongols and Global History (W.W. Norton, 2010)

Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (University of California, 2005)

Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (University of California, 1988)

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office: 926 IAB
Office Hours: R 1-2:30 pm and by appointment
Phone Number: (212) 854-0129
Email: ln2358@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Yale University, 2008
BA: University of Pennsylvania, 1996

Classes Taught

The Vietnam War
The United States and East Asia
The Wars for Indochina
Southest Asia & the World

Research Interests

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, specializes in the Vietnam War, U.S.-Southeast Asian relations, and the global Cold War. Professor Nguyen is currently working on a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive for RandomHouse. She is the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols., as well as co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations.

Selected Publications

Books

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Tet 1968: The Battles that Changed the Vietnam War and the Global Cold War (New York: Random House, forthcoming).

Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Scholarly Articles

“Revolutionary Circuits: Toward Internationalizing America in the World,” Diplomatic History 39, Issue 3 (June 2015): 411-422.

“1968: Negotiating While Fighting or Just Fighting?” in Eds. Pierre Journoud and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, Vietnam, 1968-1976: Exiting a War (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011).

“The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of the War,” in Eds. Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

“Waging War on All Fronts: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, 1969-1972” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Cold War Contradictions: Toward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969-1973” in Eds. Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Sino-Vietnamese Split in the Post-Tet War in Indochina, 1968-1975” in Eds. Sophie Quinn-Judge and Odd Arne Westad, The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-1979 (London: Routledge Press, 2006).

“Vietnamese Perceptions of the French-Indochina War” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Mark Lawrence, Indochina in the Balance: New Perspectives on the First Vietnam War.  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

“The War Politburo: Vietnam’s Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (February/August 2006).